This specification relates to information retrieval for identifying and ranking experts and areas of expertise.
Organizations typically maintain electronic directories of people who are affiliated with the organization and who are associated with particular electronic documents related to activities of the organization. Additionally, each person in the directory may have a profile that lists skills that the given person is considered to have expertise. In some systems, these skills can be statically defined by someone, e.g. a trained administrator. Using a search query to search such a directory for a particular person generally returns a list of people based on how similar a person's name is to the search query. Similarly, using another search query specifying a particular skill generally returns a list of people based on whether words of the search query appear in a profile associated with the person.